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The wacko conspiracies aren't due to populism, it's the opposite.
People understand they have an antagonistic relationship with the government, but they don't have the theory and historical knowledge to understand the systems at play due to centuries of anti-communist propaganda, so they latch onto conspiracies that match their prejudices and don't threaten any of their beliefs.
We saw the same thing with nazi germany.
You've basically defined populism:
Say whatever rhetoric you believe to be currently popular at this very moment, with absolutely no coherent or consistent policies, within the framework of 'all us normal people' vs 'those degenerate elites.'
This is actually precisely in line with appealing to latent rhetoric and amplifying and creating conspiracies.
Trump did/does this, the Nazis did this.
Basically all populists say whatever the fuck they want and then their actual policies are almost always in line with whatever helps out them and their immediate friends/allies the most. But these can also turn on a dime.
Instability and erratic decision making are the hallmarks of basically every populist leader in the modern era.
Mostly only in the US does the term 'populist' have connotations of actually popularly supported policy positions, as mostly only in the US is 'Libertarian' a right wing, pro business ideology instead of a left wing, socialist ideology, and mostly only in the US does communism/socialism mean 'whenever the government spends money on stuff I don't want it to.'
You are correct though that populism works best in a very stupid, uneducated, angry population.
... Which is why the Republicans actual 'masterful political strategy' of the last 30 or 40 years was:
Make everyone stupid and uneducated by destroying public education, and angry via bombastic fear and hate spread via talk radio, tv news, and more lately the internet.
That explains it, that's the only way I've seen it used when referring to modern America. NYT opinion columnists like it because it allows them to paint leftwing policy that is popular because it helps everyone and rightwing policy that is popular because most American have unexamined white supremacist beliefs with the same brush.
Yeah... its fairly common parlance meaning in the US is basically as if it is just 'someone who supports policies that polls show over majority support for'... even though its actual meaning when used by academic political scientists or historians is more along the lines of what I described.
Though of course, lately, and mostly in America, now even academics are attempting to rexamine/redefine the concept to be more broad and inclusive.
Its literally stereotypical insulated elitist liberal both-sidesism that only seems possible in America.
Its almost entirely happened because a whole, whole lot of journalists just could not figure out how to summarily describe Trump seriously as a candidate in 2016.
Enough of them threw up their hands and decided, fuck it, he's a populist.
Of course, they made the mistake of thinking that readers/viewers were competent/intelligent enough to realize that this should be understood to mean: potentially dangerous demagogue with wildly inconsistent and often laughably absurd actual policy positions, such as somehow making Mexico pay for a border wall, a huge departure from previous Presidential candidates with... you know, discernable, fairly specific and detailed actual policy platforms, some kind of solid and identifiable ideology that these policies stemmed from, whose merits could be compared and contrasted with others.
Populism: historically almost always results in domestic chaos, autocracy, mismanagement corruption, across all historical examples, empirically.
Unfortunately the average American now seems to have roughly the reading comprehension level of a 5th or 6th grader, so they did what children who don't know what a word or term means when they don't feel like looking it up or researching it: just guess a reasonable meaning based on context and similarity to other words.
Many did not realize the subtext that 'populist' should be a big giant warning flag, and basically read it as 'popular'.
... And then we've had the last 8 years of stupifying insanity where most of the failing mainstream media got gutted and bought out by corporate interests and kept running with this crass, mutated use of 'populist', as it helped explain to morons that 'well you know both sides have their merits and fancy classifying words that describe them'.
Its actually Orwellian.
Words getting misunderstood and then neutered and redefined to the point of just being mostly empty signifiers, shaping the very language of political discourse toward being vague and useless.